Festoons with Flowers, Fruit and Angels

This canvas is more than three times as tall as it is wide, and that shape is the first clue to it. The Prado reads it as a picture made for one particular place, perhaps the narrow pier between two windows, or the angle of a room, which is why everything in it hangs in a vertical swag of flowers and fruit with small winged figures among the stems. The museum divides the authorship: the flowers go to Jan Brueghel the Elder, the fruit to Frans Snyders, the cherubs to Rubens and his workshop, three Antwerp specialists on one canvas around 1620. By 1700 it was in the royal Alcázar in Madrid, and it was still moving between rooms of the royal palace in 1818.